In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race: How the Presidency Paved the Road to Brown
  • Benjamin Ponder
Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race: How the Presidency Paved the Road to Brown. By Kevin J. McMahon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004; pp x + 298. $20.00 cloth.

Kevin J. McMahon's compelling and provocative book aggressively interrogates the conventional wisdom on Franklin Delano Roosevelt's civil rights legacy. More alluring in its arguments than its prose, the book dissects Rooseveltian hagiography, revealing a profoundly nuanced causal chain connecting the failure of the first New Deal to the Warren Court's landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education. McMahon is not an apologist for FDR's "front door" silence on civil rights; the narrative depicts an incurably practical politician whose early success was due in large measure to white southern votes. But this revisionist account highlights several "back door" innovations, accumulating to create the progressive, rights-based political climate that would eventually birth substantive civil rights reform.

Methodologically, McMahon eschews attitudinal and legal explanations of judicial activism for a presidency-centered, institution-driven account of the ideological migration of the U.S. Supreme Court from the 1930s to the 1950s. McMahon extends Stephen Skowronek's order-based typology of the presidency by paying attention not only to the president himself but also to the defenders of the order—largely southern Dixiecrats—FDR eventually sought to shatter.

While deftly steering clear of a composite biography of mid-century High Court appointees, McMahon provides his readers with a rounded description of the political tensions underlying each nomination. With very few exceptions, FDR's relatively diverse judicial appointments followed a logic based upon a commitment to legal realism (as opposed to the legal formalism of the old order), rights-centered liberalism, and personal (above partisan) loyalty—even deference—to FDR. In what McMahon calls FDR's "constitutional vision," his image of an ideal institutional order, the Supreme Court would no longer usurp the creative impulse of an aggrandized presidency (62).

Central to McMahon's argument is a re-reading of FDR's Court-packing plan of 1937. Viewed largely by history as the anomalous recalcitrance of an otherwise brilliant leader, McMahon finds in this constitutional crisis a map for FDR's subsequent approach to the judiciary. Frustrated by the Supreme Court's evisceration of the first New Deal, the author of the modern presidency turned his attention to the creation of a modern judiciary, a Court matching the times. Though FDR's legislative plan died suddenly along with Senate Majority leader and Roosevelt ally Joe T. Robinson, the president's commitment to reform of the federal judiciary was unwavering. FDR's shrewd judicial appointments over the next seven years (as the older justices died or retired in rapid succession) created a truly Roosevelt Court. As McMahon tells it, FDR, widely recognized for his expansive approach to the presidency, also wrought an institutional revolution in the judiciary with major ramifications for the [End Page 423] future of American society. Not the least of these ramifications, Roosevelt's nominees would endure on the bench to form the majority in the Brown decision.

McMahon's historical explication of FDR's genetic role in the civil rights movement is not limited to the Supreme Court; indeed, broad coverage of the politics of the era contributes to the persuasiveness of the book's argument. McMahon demonstrates that the 1939 creation of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Section (CRS) was initiated by FDR himself. Under the leadership of progressive Attorney General Frank Murphy, the CRS posed serious challenges to a Deep South political structure built upon white supremacy. The CRS, working in tandem with the NAACP and the ACLU, began in the 1940s a vigorous attack on southern political pillars such as the white primary, the poll tax, lynching, and police brutality.

Not surprisingly, McMahon's narrative continues beyond the death of FDR. The concluding chapters chronicle the development of Supreme Court opinions on civil rights during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. Even after some questionable appointments by FDR's successors, the norm of deference to the executive branch's positions continued, increasing the importance of the Justice Department's briefs...

pdf

Share